Heraclitean Fire
by Lomonaaeren
Summary: HPDM slash. Hit by a deadly curse, Harry has only two weeks to live. Draco invites him to spend it investigating a house haunted by something other than ghosts.
1. Your Wildest Nightmares

**Title: **Heraclitean Fire

**Disclaimer: **J. K. Rowling and associates own these characters. I am writing this story for fun and not profit.

**Pairing: **Harry/Draco

**Rating: **R

**Warnings: **Heavy angst, sex, violence, profanity, dub-con, minor character deaths, no epilogue.

**Summary: **Hit by a curse that will slowly destroy him, Harry makes his will and looks about for something to fill the last fortnight of his life. An invitation from Draco Malfoy to help him clear an inherited property haunted by something other than ghosts may be just what Harry needs—in more ways than one.

**Author's Notes: **This is a fairly dark story, and will be irregularly updated. I'm anticipating nine to ten chapters. The title refers to a concept advanced by the Greek writer Heraclitus, about the primordial nature of things: "This world, which is the same for all, no one of gods or men has made; but it was ever, is now, and ever shall be eternal fire."

**Heraclitean Fire**

_Chapter One—Your Wildest Nightmares_

"There's no doubt. I'm sorry, Mr. Potter."

Harry closed his eyes. It was odd, he thought, but the voice of the Auror Healer in front of him held more sorrow than he could feel himself right now. It was probably because, from the moment that blue light had hit him from the wand of the Dark wizard he was trying to capture—the _first _Dark wizard, since he'd just come out of Auror training—he'd felt it was something serious. Ron had laughed and clapped Harry's shoulder when they ended up bringing in the wizard anyway, telling him not to worry, but the conviction had remained in the back of Harry's mind, gnawing a place for itself.

"Thanks for telling me," he said, his voice creaking. "For being honest." He opened his eyes and smiled at the Auror Healer. Her name was Aphrodite Mistborn, and she smiled back through her tears.

"I'm so sorry," she repeated.

"I know." Harry heaved himself to his feet with a sigh. "It isn't even an obscure curse," he muttered, "but one well-known and understood. I wonder if he thought about that when he was casting it at me?"

"Oh, most likely not." Mistborn sounded a little shocked. "Wizards like Herne aren't—they aren't _sane_. He knew by that point that you would stop him, and he wanted you to suffer. That was why he chose the Withering Curse."

Harry nodded, shook Mistborn's hand, and then left the Healers' division of the Department of Magical Law Enforcement, walking back to his own office. The people who passed him whispered under their breaths or behind their hands and gave him compassionate, shocked looks. Harry ignored that as best as he could, continuing to walk with his head held high. He wouldn't break down in front of people who all but fed on his misery, who couldn't feel for him as a fellow sufferer but were only interested in "how the Savior would bear his agony," as the _Prophet _would have phrased it.

The Withering Curse. It would destroy him slowly, wilting various parts of his body: twisting his limbs, shutting down his inner organs, making him forget things and suffer from personality changes as it attacked his brain. It was an old curse, invented centuries ago, but studied thoroughly since people began to use it. There was no cure, and the pain was awful.

_Well, _Harry thought again, because Mistborn had been precise, _there is one cure, but one I won't take. _He would have had to murder an innocent in cold blood, splitting his soul. Through some mystical magical theory Harry didn't understand, the Withering Curse connected body and soul. A murder affected the victim in such a way that it would disrupt the curse's hold on the body and free the victim from it.

But Harry would never do that, and he didn't even have to worry about someone doing it for him; the murder had to be performed of the victim's own free will, or it meant nothing. He was going to die.

It was over.

He reached his office, grateful that Ron wasn't there right now, and sat down, his legs extended to the fire while he thought. He knew what he wanted to do—run screaming—and he knew what he had to do. He wanted Number Twelve Grimmauld Place, the Potter and Black vaults, his Invisibility Cloak, and his other things to go to people who could appreciate them. That meant a will.

It seemed so strange and so foreign that he could almost have laughed. He'd got through the war with Voldemort, he'd survived Auror training that he thought sometimes would kill or break him, and he'd even fought off a few people who had turned murderous along the way because they'd been so jealous of him or seen a chance to get famous by killing the Savior. He'd come into what was supposed to be the prime of his life, twenty-two years old, ready to arrest the people he'd spent the last three years training to defeat.

And now he was going to die.

It helped to think about that fact over and over, Harry decided, pounding it into his head like a blunt nail. Otherwise, he might start hoping and dreaming, shoving the start of the curse away into the future. Mistborn had confirmed that he had a fortnight from today—seventeen days from the day of the curse—before the pain would begin. Seventeen had been an important number to the original creator of the Withering Curse, because his little sister had wasted away from a disease that took seventeen days to kill her, and, in hatred against an unjust world he believed could have helped her, Jeremiah Dill had decided that anyone affected by his curse would suffer anticipation for as long.

They understood everything, from Dill's madness to the best way to solve the problem, Harry thought. They couldn't hope for a sudden, miraculous cure out of nowhere. Hermione had spent the last three days with books, but Harry knew it wouldn't help. Mistborn had told him the truth: the lore on the Withering Curse was extensive and had been centrally organized from the beginning. It just wouldn't help.

The door opened. Harry glanced up and saw Ron standing there, his face twisted.

"Mistborn confirmed it?" he whispered. Their last hope had been that Herne, the wizard they'd been hunting, hadn't used the Withering Curse, but some other spell. That was why Harry had visited Mistborn this morning, after having given the Healers some time to examine his body for traces of the curse.

Harry nodded.

Ron closed his eyes and gave a single, long, tearing sob.

Harry stood up and made his way across the office to his friend, patting him clumsily on the shoulder before he hugged him. Ron grabbed him and hugged him back, a pressure that made Harry grunt and feel as if his ribs would stave in his lungs. But Ron continued to hold him, and after a minute, Harry could think about what he was feeling and understand.

They stood there for so long that Harry wondered if he'd need to take Ron home, but his friend stepped back, wiping his hand across his nose and sniffling without a thought for how it would make him look. Harry had to turn back to the fire. When Ron didn't care about looking manly, then he really was affected.

"What are we going to do?" Ron's voice was low, still tear-choked, but expectant. Harry knew that he was looking to Harry to be the leader he always had been, during their adventures at Hogwarts and the Horcrux Hunt and during Auror training. Harry had told Ron that he was just as good at thinking for himself, like the way he'd reasoned out the strategy for the chess game when they went after the Philosopher's Stone, but Ron grinned and said he preferred to have someone else do the leading, whether that was Harry or Hermione. That way, he could come in with the idea that saved everyone at the last instant and get the glory with none of the work.

Those thoughts made Harry smile and take a deep breath. Ron and Hermione and the rest of the Weasleys were still going to be here when he'd gone. The least he could do was think of ways to make their lives happy and comfortable.

"I need to go home and think about what I'm going to leave where," he said. "But I can make the will tomorrow. Right now, you can come home with me and get roaring drunk."

Ron pounded him on the shoulder in approval, and they left together, Harry determined not to think beyond the next few hours.

* * *

"And to my son, Draco Malfoy, under the terms of my will…"

Draco raised his eyebrows. Frankly, he'd been surprised when his father's solicitor commanded him to attend the reading of the will in Hogsmeade. Lucius hadn't exactly approved of Draco's "activities" during the last few years. Those activities had included both fucking men and altering Dark artifacts so that they could be classified as Light and sold for a considerable sum. Draco wasn't sure which one had worried Lucius the most, actually.

But he was here, and his mother, graceful and composed and perfect, was here, and if she had inherited the Manor and most of the money, it seemed that Lucius had left Draco something after all. Draco prepared himself to hear that it was some paltry amount of money, just large enough to be insulting.

"…I leave the house called Bubonic, which stands in the west of Surrey." The solicitor laid down the will and cleared his throat. He was a large, nervous-looking man who fiddled with his glasses so often that Draco was amazed he could see out of them; they must be covered with fingerprint smudges. "That's all. Your father did not specify what he wanted done with the house. You may sell it or tear it down or live in it, as you will."

"Bubonic," Draco repeated, with his eyes narrowed. He'd thought he knew all the names of all the Malfoy properties, as well as the Black ones that his mother had brought—or should have brought—into the family. Lucius had repeated them over and over again in the last few years since he'd returned from Azkaban, an endless litany of curses against the people who had inherited those properties, most of them not even pure-bloods, due to the vagaries of some ancestor or another. "I don't know the place."

His mother made a small sound. Draco glanced at her and saw her sitting with her hand over her mouth, her eyes wide.

Draco hadn't often seen his mother display fear, but he knew it when he saw it. He turned back to the solicitor and spoke quietly. "What is this place? Why did my father leave it to me when he left nothing else?"

The solicitor shook his head and took his glasses off, probably so that he could pretend to be busy polishing them. "The late Mr. Malfoy didn't confide in me about his intentions, Mr. Malfoy. I'm sorry. I wish there was something I could tell you. But what I mentioned already is true. This is a free gift, with no conditions. You don't have to accept it."

_The name of the place is hardly promising, _Draco thought dryly. _I reckon there's a curse attached, and my father hoped it would consume me._

But when he thought about it, he realized that he was considering this the wrong way. Lucius Malfoy's gifts were never so single-edged. There had to be something in the house that could eat Draco—in one way or another—but also something that would reward him if he was clever or daring enough. Lucius had been full of the praise of daring in his last years, especially lamenting when Potter's luck outraced any number of risky attempts on his life.

"I'll accept it," Draco said.

His mother gasped again. Draco didn't look at her, but knew that they would be talking later.

Finally, they were outside the solicitor's office again, and Draco stretched his arms up to the air. His sides ached with the long compression it seemed they had suffered in the office. He had breathed air redolent with the presence of his father, and it was hard to realize that he would never suffer such a thing again.

"I wish you had not done that, Draco." His mother spoke in a subdued voice, keeping her attention on the thin white handkerchief that she was twisting between her hands.

"Why not?" Draco asked, turning to her. "Is it better to sell the house instead, do you think? It's true that I could use the money to work on my projects."

His mother only set her lips and didn't respond. Draco knew she didn't like his "projects" any more than his father had. She thought Dark artifacts should be left the way they were, as though there was some strict line between what people called Dark and Light—as if that was a law of nature, instead of a human and legal perception. Draco thought he had gone further into the true philosophy that so many of the Death Eaters and the Dark Lord had professed to believe, that there was only power and no Light or Dark. If that was right, then he could change a few things and make one into the other.

Draco smiled faintly as he thought of the latest artifact that had come into his hands. It was true that some cases were more difficult than others. Among other things, he suspected this particular artifact would require two people to work on it, and there simply wasn't someone he trusted enough to know the artifact's secret right now. He was considering the costs and benefits of hiring someone from the Continent or putting someone under the Imperius Curse.

"The story of Bubonic is a long one," his mother said, "and we should require seats."

Draco recognized one of his mother's delaying tactics. Well, this time he didn't intend to accept it. He simply nodded and held out his arm. "I've been wanting to try that new restaurant in Diagon Alley. Why don't you come with me?"

His mother grimaced lightly and took his elbow. Draco Side-Along Apparated them with great pleasure, partially because his mother dropped his arm as soon as she could. _Perhaps she thinks that the hands of a man who fucks men shouldn't touch her, _Draco thought.

He had come a long way from the days when the approval and love of his parents was all that mattered to him. Of course, they had become shadows of themselves after the war, and he had started to look about him and seen that he would have to make his own way in the world if he wanted a place in it at all.

The new restaurant was down a slight side-alley, the only building there, and set into the stone of the walls. Draco smiled when he stepped through the doors and saw the cavern theme continued with walls that glittered like geodes, a floor patterned with a mosaic of an abyss, and stalactites of basalt and granite hanging from the ceiling. His mother, behind him, gasped when she walked out over that shining black abyss.

"A table," Draco told the waiter who came to lead them in, clad in robes of purest white, so as to glow in the dim place. Luckily, their table had candles. Draco wanted to be able to see every flicker of expression on his mother's face as she spoke.

When they were seated and had ordered drinks—the house's specialty of orange-flavored wine for Draco, water for Narcissa—the waiter left them alone, and Draco leaned forwards, arms folded in front of him, and looked patiently at his mother.

"Don't put your elbows on the table," she said, but it was obviously automatic, with nothing of her heart in it. She looked from left to right, and waited until her water had come, after which she began to drink it compulsively. Draco sipped his wine and waited.

As he had suspected would happen, the dark atmosphere and the grief at her husband's death broke down his mother's resolve. She shoved her water away from her hard enough to slop some on the table; Draco thought about commenting on that but didn't. Her mouth was finally opening, her eyes grim and fixed on him, and he thought he would get the answers he deserved and desired.

"Bubonic remained in the Malfoy family when the properties were parceled up among your ancestors' cousins centuries ago because no one else wanted it," she said abruptly. "It is a haunted place."

Draco snorted. "You forget that ghosts have held no terrors for me since I went to Hogwarts, Mother."

"There are other ways in which things can be haunted," Narcissa said, and her fingers dug into the obsidian-smooth top of the table. "Your father intended to tell you about it once you came of age, the way that other Malfoy heirs have been told. But he saw your daring and your—courage, and he concluded that you would think you could go in and tame the house, rather than simply accepting the treasures from it."

"Treasures?" Draco asked, cocking an eyebrow. Contrary to what his parents thought, he would be content to reap rewards for lesser work, as long as those rewards were good enough.

Narcissa nodded quickly. "The house produces four black diamonds each year, at the turn of each season. If you gather them, as your father did, and sell them, then you can be rich enough to satisfy your wildest nightmares without the inheritance. The diamonds are always found lying outside the house's front door."

Draco tapped his finger against the table. If Bubonic had been that simple, his mother would have had no reason to show horror at the bequest (other than that, perhaps, it could have made Draco independently wealthy). And Lucius would have had no reason to give him such a simple gift.

"What else?" he asked. "What happens if I enter the house?"

Narcissa shut her eyes. "Lucius never considered me worthy to learn the innermost secrets," she hedged. "He never seemed to think that anyone without Malfoy blood should know the truth."

Knowing how much more his father had valued her than Draco, Draco simply arched a brow in doubt and waited.

"But there is something else in the house," Narcissa continued. "Something that makes it haunted, something that will produce great wealth—greater than the black diamonds—if conquered. I don't know what it is. I think the stories of wealth a myth, myself. But those are the stories."

Draco nodded. "And did my father ever venture inside after this secret?"

"Soon after he came out of Azkaban," Narcissa said. "It was the source of the weakness in his lungs that killed him."

Draco sat up. "I thought that was simply the cold environment of Azkaban and his disappointment with me."

Narcissa gave him a speaking glance, as though to say that Lucius's disappointment had had more than enough to do with it. Draco looked calmly in return, and once again she backed down in front of him.

"I never saw anything like the scars on his lungs that the Healers showed me," Narcissa said softly. "They could have been the marks of claws, but of course, if they had been, he would not have survived. I think that the house is haunted by a spirit of disease, hence the name, and that anyone entering it will be extremely lucky if they manage to survive."

Draco grunted. He still thought it was possible that Lucius's weakness had come from the prison alone, and that this tale was the one Narcissa told herself to lessen her shock and fear that her husband had died so young. But the scars on the lungs were an intriguing piece of evidence.

And a spirit of disease…such spirits had to have someplace to live. Draco thought it possible that a Dark artifact was in the house, a more powerful one than he had ever encountered, and of course his fingers itched to possess it.

"I'm not saying what I'll do yet, Mother," he said. "Black diamonds sound like more than enough wealth to tempt anyone."

His mother gave him a suspicious look. "But you value other things more than wealth."

Draco smiled and sipped his wine.

* * *

He still hadn't exactly decided what to do the next morning, when he opened the _Daily Prophet _and caught sight of the photograph and the headline. The photograph was Potter turning away from the camera, his head bowed and a look of devastation on his face. The headline screamed: **SAVIOR DYING FROM THE WITHERING CURSE!**

The accompanying article cast everything into the brave, martyred Gryffindor mode that Draco would have expected from Potter, saying that Potter wanted to spend the fortnight he still had before the pain began doing something to help others. He didn't know what that would be yet, but he invited people to contact him if they had projects he could help with.

Draco smiled and smoothed a thumb down the page. He wasn't really _satisfied _that Potter was dying, but he had to admit a cool unsurprise. That one was never destined for a long life, the way he charged into things.

And then he sat still for a moment before he laughed. He was still smiling, unusually for him before the work of the day had begun, as he stood and made his way to his Owlery.

Potter might say, or imply, that he'd rather work at charitable projects, but Draco knew better. The impulse to adventure ran deepest in Potter's being, rather than the compassionate one. Having discovered a tendency to that himself as he worked with Dark artifacts, Draco could sympathize, a bit.

If Draco offered an opportunity for Potter to adventure in Bubonic with him, Potter would probably snatch it. He could explain to his friends that he wanted to redeem Malfoy, or something equally stupid. He could do whatever he wanted. But Draco thought it was a hook that would catch him.

And meanwhile, he would venture into the place with a powerful, Auror-trained wizard at his back—one who feared no death the place could fling at him.

Draco grinned down at his letter as he composed it.

_Dear Potter, _

_So sorry to hear that you're dying…_


	2. Bubonic's Front Door

Thank you for all the reviews!

_Chapter Two—Bubonic's Front Door_

"Is he _serious_, mate?"

Harry shook his head and stared at the newly-arrived letter, which had come to him as he was sitting with Ron at breakfast, nursing a headache with the help of a Hangover Potion and toast. It was a strange letter. It was from Draco Malfoy, someone he hadn't heard from for three years, and it sounded exactly the way Harry would have expected a letter from Malfoy to sound: uncaring and pretentious.

But he was making a proposal, and he seemed to expect a serious answer to the proposal, if not the rest of it, since his owl had waited and was currently preening its gleaming black feathers on a perch in the corner of the room.

_Dear Potter,_

_ So sorry to hear that you're dying. _

_ You may or may not be aware that my father, Lucius Malfoy, died last week. He left me a house called Bubonic, which apparently has secrets tucked inside it. What they are, no one exactly knows, though my mother believes that my father died in part from his investigation of the house. I could use some help in clearing out the ghosts, or spirits, or whatever they are, who live there, and you were the first person I thought of on seeing the article in the _Prophet _this morning._

_ I admit that part of this comes from the fact that you're dying, and have less to fear from what lurks in Bubonic than most people. But I could use an Auror-trained wizard to recognize and ward off the Dark magic, and I wouldn't like to go exploring by myself, in case I died and there was no one to carry the news back to my mother. I could use your company._

_As a further inducement, I can offer to make a donation to any charity you'll like. I'm certainly rich enough to do that. You said that you wanted to do something helpful with your last days, and this would fulfill that criterion while also allowing you to risk your life. I know how much you love to do that._

_Cordially,_

_ Draco Malfoy._

No matter how much he read it, the letter didn't get any more straightforward or make any more sense. Harry pushed it away from him, frowning, and then took another sip of the Hangover Potion. He might have drunk a _little _less last night.

He was going to die in thirteen days. He tried to remind himself of that, but the fact slid away from him like a cat on glass.

"What should I do?" he asked Ron. He would have asked Hermione, but she had spent most of the night at the library and then got up before them this morning, to go back to the books and try to find a cure for the Withering Curse.

"What do you _mean_, what should you do?" Ron sent a few crumbs flying from his mouth when he spoke. His stare was frankly incredulous, and Harry began to feel a bit stupid for asking the question. "You refuse, of course! You're going to spend your last days with us. As if we would let you do anything else," he scoffed, and reached out for his own glass full of potion to take a healthy gulp.

Harry frowned and toyed with his plate. He hoped that Ron wouldn't notice the silence, but Ron did and stared at him. "Mate? You can't mean that you're thinking about this?"

"He did promise a donation," Harry muttered, but he knew it was ridiculous. He had accepted that he was going to die, hadn't he? And he would spend time with his friends before then. It was the normal, the natural, thing to do. He would be stupid if he went off and risked his life for the sake of enriching Malfoy. That was what this had to be about; the small scraps of news Harry had picked up about Malfoy since the war implied that he only cared for Galleons and men, maybe not in that order. Harry couldn't see what this scheme about Bubonic had to do with acquiring boyfriends for Malfoy, though.

But…

The simple truth was that he didn't _want _to spend his last two weeks comforting his friends every time they cried about his impending death. He'd comforted Ron last night, and Ginny had broken down in his arms the day before, and Hermione had sobbed for a short time before pulling herself together and going to do research. Harry would visit the Weasleys shortly, and he expected to be overwhelmed by their grief.

They had every right to feel it. But Harry was the one who would go through the pain, the one who knew exactly how long he had to live right now and exactly what he would die of. He wanted to do something else, something _more_, than wallowing in the emotions of his friends and trying frantically to find a cure that didn't exist, which was Hermione's method of coping. When she found out that that wouldn't work, Harry expected to have someone else on his hands who he would have to talk to and hold and soothe.

It was what he did. It had always been what he did. He and Ginny had tried to be with each other for a while, but they didn't know _how _to be. Ginny wanted to share emotions with him, and Harry wasn't reluctant to talk about his, but somehow the right words never came to him. It was so much easier to listen to her stories, like her memories of Hogwarts in the year the Carrows were there, and sympathize, and then it would have got too late or Ginny would want comfort sex and they didn't have to talk about his.

He'd wanted to. Somehow time got away from him.

And now there would be no more time.

But he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory, Harry thought, flattening the letter down with the palm of his hand. Malfoy was right about that. He had made the offer to help people because he hoped that would get him away from grief and nothing but grief for a while, and he'd received plenty of letters. But none of the projects were suitable. They didn't want his help, they wanted his _name_, or his Galleons. Harry wanted something to do. He wasn't going to helplessly waste away until he utterly _had _to.

Malfoy's project sounded horrid and cynical, but it also sounded interesting. Not much else did to Harry right now.

Not that he was going to accept it, of course. It would turn out to be a trick, Harry was certain, because Malfoy hated Harry as much as everyone else desperately loved him, and he was writing just to taunt. Harry had to shake his head over how intricate the deception was, though. Perhaps Malfoy had nothing better to do.

_When you can learn to lie better, _he scrawled on the single sheet of parchment that was all that he would allow himself, _then I might listen to you_.

He didn't bother signing it, since he was sure Malfoy would remember the last person he had sent his owl to, and instead just held it out to Malfoy's bird. The owl eyed him sternly, while Harry continued to hold it out, until the bird seemed resigned to the fact that it wouldn't get a proper envelope or a proper anything else. It stooped forwards, grabbed the letter with a nip to Harry's fingers, and took off.

"What did you say?" Ron asked. He'd watched the byplay with interest, enough that he'd finished his toast and only now took another piece from the plate in the center of the table.

"That he should get stuffed," Harry responded around his own mouthful.

It made Ron laugh, and that lightened the grief for a moment, and that was precious.

* * *

Draco arched an eyebrow. He had expected to have to persuade a reluctant Potter by detailing the terms he was prepared to offer; he hadn't thought Potter would accuse him of deception and think no more about it. He tapped his finger for a moment as he stood in front of the Owlery. The bird he had sent to Potter, Dignus, was still incredibly ruffled and currently dozing with his head under his wing.

Draco looked along the line of owls, trying to settle on the one that would convey the appropriate response to Potter and get him to open Draco's next letter. But then Draco shook his head and stepped back, shutting the door of the Owlery.

No. He had gone about this the wrong way. He had written to Potter like the Hogwarts schoolboy that Potter remembered, and it was small wonder if Potter reacted to that badly. Draco would have to go in person, apologize for the mocking tone of the last letter, and explain the situation in more detail. Potter might be impressed enough by that to listen.

If he wasn't, then Draco would think of something else.

He cast a glance at his latest acquisition as he came through the door. It crouched in the middle of his drawing room, draped with chains and a warding circle, but managed to radiate a cold malevolence even through that. Draco rolled his eyes.

"I haven't given up on you just because I haven't worked on you for a few days," he told the artifact, which resembled a great steel sculpture of a turtle with a fifth leg instead of a head. "I'll change your nature yet."

Magic coiled around the wards, snapped half-visible jaws at him, and then dissipated. Draco chuckled and went to his fireplace. Speaking to a few people in the Ministry should tell him where Potter was likely to be at this hour.

* * *

"There must be something, Harry. I know there's something."

Harry smiled—he hoped it wasn't too sad, or he was liable to get another scolding—and patted Hermione's hand. "You think what you need to think, Hermione," he murmured, "and do what you need to do."

Hermione sniffed at him and plunged back into the pile of research in front of her. Harry leaned back and looked around. This library was the largest room in the house that Ron and Hermione owned, and it literally bulged with books. Harry didn't want to know what would happen when Hermione recovered from this latest project and noticed all the books that were stacked in boxes instead of packed neatly away on the shelves, as she thought they should be.

Then he reminded himself forcibly that he wouldn't be around to see that happen, since he would be either in St. Mungo's or dead by then.

Harry shut his eyes. With the sunlight falling on his skin and Hermione mumbling and murmuring away next to him as if she were working on a new mystery about Nicholas Flamel, it seemed impossible that he would die in a few weeks.

But he would. The kinder thing, Harry was convinced, was to make himself face it. He still wouldn't be ready at the end, of course; he would still want to disbelieve it and to run away from the doom his own body carried. But thinking about it every day, spending some time in death's company, would make him less likely to panic.

He hoped, anyway.

"Someone is here to be seeing Master Harry Potter!" Winky appeared in front of them and bowed anxiously to Hermione first, as mistress of the house, and then to Harry. She wore a fairly sturdy handkerchief around her belly, which Harry was glad for. Among the sights of his last weeks, he didn't need house-elf genitals. "Someone—important!"

Hermione only nodded absently, but Harry raised an eyebrow. Hermione lived under several delusions regarding Winky, one of which was that she paid her—instead, Ron collected the Galleon back from Winky at the end of the week—and another that she had given up referring to people the way house-elves usually did. Harry knew that "important" to a house-elf usually meant someone from a pure-blood family.

"Who?" he asked.

Winky gave a look at Hermione that Harry understood perfectly. This was someone Hermione would get upset about. Harry stood up and followed Winky out of the library, then bent down towards her. "You can tell me, Winky," he said coaxingly.

Winky still stood on tiptoes to get close to his ear so she could whisper. "It is being Master Draco Malfoy, Master Harry Potter Savior, sir."

Harry slapped a hand over his face. Of _course _Malfoy would be pushing and shoving his way in where he didn't belong, acting as though he could take whatever he wanted and it would be fine. Harry wanted to shake his head. No, better, he wanted to grab Malfoy and shake him. The git couldn't even leave Harry alone to die in peace.

_Neither can your friends._

Harry winced. His thoughts from that morning seemed selfish and far away. He knew that he shouldn't want to spend his last days doing something that might get him killed. And of course he appreciated that his friends' lives would be changed by what had happened to him. He wouldn't want to miss a moment of that.

But still…

"Is Master Harry Potter Savior sir having something wrong?"

Winky's anxious voice called Harry back to himself. He was in the middle of a corridor with a house-elf who looked as if she would die of angst if he waited too long. He forced himself to lower his hand and speak in a calm voice.

"No, Winky. You can show Malfoy into a room, and I'll come down in a minute."

"I is showing him into a room already, sir!" Winky began bouncing and beaming at him. "Important visitors is not to be waiting on the doorstep!"

Harry grimaced. He was glad that Ron had left for the moment, so that Harry wouldn't have to have an argument with him over having Malfoy in the house. "I see," he muttered. "Then take me to him, please."

"This way, Master Harry Potter Chosen One sir!" Winky led Harry through the door with her chest so puffed-up that Harry kept expecting to see her toes leave the floor. He shook his head when he realized that Winky had put Malfoy in Hermione's favorite room. Hermione would probably want to scrub the chairs if he had actually sat in them, the books if he had touched them.

Harry hesitated before he opened the door. Did he want to go have an argument instead of simply sitting quietly with Hermione and trying to absorb the sights around him, to fill his senses with as much as possible, before he never had the chance to do something like that again?

_If I want to fill my senses as much as I possibly can, then only relying on what I can see from Hermione and Ron's windows isn't the way to do it._

Harry sighed, got rid of the useless debate, and pushed the door open.

* * *

Granger had better taste than Draco would have expected from a Muggleborn and Muggle-lover. She had several volumes of novels and books of poetry that Draco would have read with pleasure on a rainy afternoon. He had just taken down Catherine Welsh's book _A Mist in the Lightborns_ when Potter stepped through the door and confronted him.

Draco took his time about sliding the book back into place. He was a guest in this house, or at least he should be, and that meant he couldn't be accused of stealing his host's property without more proof than Potter currently possessed. He leaned back against the shelf, and they looked at each other.

Potter was pale, no surprise, and still wore bedraggled Auror robes, as though he had been wearing them since the moment the Withering Curse hit him. Draco wouldn't have been surprised to learn that was the case. He only knew from his perusal of the shelves that one of the Grand Trio of war heroes, as the papers often called them, had taste, not that all of them had changed into sane and responsible adults.

_In fact, Potter's willingness to die learning about what he can do for others suggests that he'll never have the chance to grow up._

"Malfoy." Potter's tone could have been called polite in the same way that the summer weather outside the windows was icy. "What did you want?"

"I came to apologize." Draco was glad that he had practiced his speech before he entered the house. It kept him from embarrassing grimaces and simply stopping in the middle of a sentence before he could continue. He watched Potter's face, and absorbed the sight of his sagging jaw and widening eyes with some satisfaction. The only thing that would have been better was if Weasley and Granger were in the room to hear it, too. Then again, they would interrupt the private consultation he wanted to have with Potter, so it was a good thing they weren't. Draco continued, studying Potter for, he realized, some sign that the Withering Curse had begun its work already. "I shouldn't have approached you in such an insensitive way. You've just learned devastating news, and the least I could have done was show you a bit of sympathy. I know you don't have a reason to believe me, but I hoped that coming myself would show you how sincerely sorry I am." He ended with a slight bow of his head and an extension of his arms, to show that he was even more sincere and truthful than Potter might think at the moment.

Potter stood there with his eyes half-shut, as if contemplating some spectacle behind his eyelids more worth staring at than an apologetic Draco. Draco straightened up, frowning. He hoped that his show had worked and Potter would now be in a more reasonable mood. If not, he had wasted a good speech and half the morning.

"Yes, fine, right," Potter said, and Draco wondered whether it was worth having Potter with him in Bubonic if he would babble like that all the time. Then Potter shook his head and leaned forwards to squint at Draco. "But you have to want something more than that, or you would've just written a letter."

Draco allowed a faint smile to tug at his lips. He had been convinced that he knew Potter. It seemed that Potter had the right to claim a certain knowledge of him back.

"Good of you to notice," he murmured. "You could say that. I meant what I said in the letter. I want your help in exploring this house I've inherited. You can't deny that it makes a better adventure than sitting around waiting for the Withering Curse to claim you."

Potter shook his head in what looked like bemusement. "But I don't want to go adventuring for the sake of your profit," he said. "Why? It's not as though you would do anything for me if you found what you were looking for."

"I promised a donation to any charity you wish to ask for," Draco reminded him. "Including that insufferable house-elf thing of Granger's."

"I should make you donate to that one, just since you mentioned it," Potter muttered.

"I'm prepared," Draco said. "But in the meantime, you'd be honor-bound to come with me if I did it."

Potter squinted at him. "From the kind of person you've become in the last few years, Malfoy, I wouldn't have said that you put any stock in honor."

"In Gryffindor honor, I do," Draco said equably. He was beginning to relax. He had been half-afraid that their antagonistic relationship would resume the moment he saw Potter, and he wouldn't be able to keep himself from responding with insults. If that had happened, then he couldn't have survived a trip into Bubonic with Potter, and it would have been better to abandon his half-formed plans at once. But this Potter was more restrained and more civil than Draco had expected him to be.

He could do this, and so could Potter.

"I don't understand why it has to be me," Potter said. "There are places where you can hire someone to risk their lives for a few hundred Galleons—less than the amount of the donation I would demand from you, anyway. And some of them would be so willing to die, just for the thrill of the adventure or the need of the money, that it would replicate the conditions of the Withering Curse. It's not as though you _absolutely _need me."

"I do." Draco didn't like admitting this, but he had come too far to turn back now at a slight difficulty. "I need someone who's _trained_, not simply someone who's willing to risk his life. And it's not so easy to hire Aurors."

"I'm still an Auror," Potter said, turning the word over in his mouth as if it had been years since he heard it. "That's right. I'm not allowed to work for a private individual who opposes the interests of the Ministry."

Draco smiled slightly. "Who said that I would do that? They must be as interested as I am in having a source of Dark magic vanish from the face of the earth. And that's what would happen if we investigated Bubonic and tamed it."

Potter sighed. He acted as though Draco was the one who didn't understand him, Draco thought, watching him, when Draco was convinced that he understood Potter perfectly. Potter's principles were the things getting in the way. If he could speak to Potter without his conscience or his friends interfering, Draco believed, then they might have agreed and been on their way to Gringotts for the Galleons they would need already.

"Look," Potter said. "I can't go with you. The whole idea's insane. First of all, we don't trust each other, and that's kind of essential in a life-and-death situation. Second, of course I can't spend my last weeks gallivanting around some Dark house with you. I have to spend it with my friends."

"Mourning," Draco said. "Crying. Listening to them mourn and cry." Potter's left eyelid twitched, and Draco knew he had struck diamonds. "Is that really what you want?"

* * *

Harry ripped his head to the side and began to pace around the room, picking up books and then dropping them again when he felt them, as if their covers burned his palms. He knew that Hermione would be angry about the way he was messing up her room, but at the moment, he couldn't care about that.

Fuck Malfoy, how did he know that? Harry had been so careful not to _show _his impatience and his desperation. He knew that the thoughts about escaping from his friends and family were wrong even as he had them, and he knew there was no cure for the Withering Curse—well, not one that he could take—so he had suppressed the thoughts because it wasn't as though he could do anything else.

And Malfoy had walked in and put his finger on the wound in Harry's conscience as surely as though he had inflicted it.

Harry turned towards Malfoy. "I won't listen to any more of this," he said. "Get out."

Malfoy remained still, gazing at Harry as though he didn't feel the magic that rattled the chairs and made the walls hum with an undertone like plucked wires. His eyes were wide, but Harry was smarter than to think it was with innocence. Malfoy wouldn't know innocence if it bit him on the arse; that was all too plain.

"I can give you what you want," Malfoy breathed. "What you need. Not a cure to the Withering Curse, of course. But the next best thing. I can ensure that your death matters, that you die like an Auror instead of an Auror trainee."

Harry had to turn his back, because otherwise he would punch Malfoy out of sheer irritation, sheer fear.

How in the _world _had Malfoy known that he wanted that, that Harry wanted to die like that if he had to die at all? The shudders crawled up Harry's spine and earthed themselves in his shoulders and his neck. It was as if Malfoy had used Legilimency on him, but Harry thought he would have recognized the feel of that.

No, this was worse. It was as though Malfoy had walked into the house, taken one look at him, and seen through the pleasant mask that Harry had fastened across his face for the benefit of everyone else.

Harry shook his head. He couldn't—he couldn't think about this. He couldn't be tempted by the demon that was Malfoy.

And he was being ridiculous, with melodramatic and paranoid thoughts, he decided, closing his eyes and resting his hand on his cheek for a moment. The coolness against his burning skin made it possible to think. He could do only one thing, and it depended not at all on his own needs and desires. He had to send Malfoy away.

He turned around and gave Malfoy a meaningless smile. If Malfoy really could see straight to the bottom of Harry's heart, then he would know it meant nothing, and why. "Thanks for coming, and thanks for the offer. But I'm not interested."

"You're too much interested, then," Malfoy said, with a pleased little nod, as though Harry's deception was a show intended for him alone. "I thought so. Well, no need to hold back and act the martyr with me, Potter. I give you permission to give in and go along. Who knows what we'll find in Bubonic? My mother thinks a spirit of disease lives there. I'm not sure what to think, myself, but I do want to experience it."

Harry shook his head. "You need to listen to what I said instead of what you want to hear. I'm not going. Thanks for the offer, but no thanks. Leave." He concentrated and pulled a bit of his magic to the surface. A book jumped off the shelf beside Malfoy and levitated to the table on the other side of him. Harry couldn't actually drop it to the floor, knowing what Hermione would do to him if a book was damaged, but he wanted to impress Malfoy with both his power _and _the state of his temper.

Malfoy stood still, as though the book had been nothing more than a fly. He studied Harry. He grunted at last, and Harry relaxed, thinking he had come to an understanding of what to be done.

"I thought so," Malfoy said. "You have the worst case of self-sacrifice I've ever seen. You're not content to die from a painful and horrible curse that no one can protect you from. You're not content to try and soothe your friends and convince them that they'll go on without you—which they will, you know. They'll live their lives, the life you no longer have, and in a few years they'll be able to smile over the memories. You won't be there to see them."

Harry tensed and stared at him. He didn't know what Malfoy's newest tactic was, whether he was trying to avenge himself on Harry for his disappointment or still convince Harry to come along, but either way, he distrusted the light, chatty tone the git had taken.

Malfoy smiled at him. "You probably tried to reason that you would always die young, right? That you weren't destined for the good things of this world after having done the great? You closed your eyes after the first confirmation about the curse and decided that, well, an Auror has to die sometime, and there are advantages to it being this way?"

"Shut your mouth, Malfoy." Harry barely recognized the ugly, dangerous crackle of his own voice.

"No." Malfoy looked at him with an expression that had a tinge of cold amusement burning in it, though he had lost his smile. "I don't think I will. You're doing exactly as you've always done, Potter, marching to your death with your head held high. When you thought you would die to defeat the Dark Lord, I could even honor you for it. But you never thought of marching anywhere else. And now it can't benefit anyone to have you die. It doesn't please you. You can't reconcile yourself to it. But you go on trying. It's the stupidest waste of a life and gifts I've ever seen," he concluded.

Harry was breathing fast enough that he thought he would pass out. His hands were clenched to the point that they hurt. His eyes kept wanting to shut, but if he did that, Malfoy would think that he was trying to hold back tears, and _that _would make the git think he had won. Harry refused to allow him that privilege.

"What do you mean, prat?" he did say, when his breath returned to him enough to form words. "You can't offer me a cure to the Withering Curse. Exactly what do you mean when you claim that I'm 'wasting' my life? I already know I'm going to die."

Later, looking back, he could identify that as the moment that Malfoy had won.

* * *

Draco smiled, though only inwardly. Potter had always been so easy to rile, and although he was an adult, he hadn't lost that quality. Draco could see the formidable blaze gathering in his eyes and hear the creaking of the bones and tendons he was putting under pressure. He wouldn't have been surprised to see Potter sprout wings of fire.

But he wasn't afraid. If he couldn't match Potter in natural magic, he still had power as strong. He carried his own collection of small artifacts, ones he had altered but didn't intend to sell, about him, around his neck and in his pockets and embedded in his wand. They would protect him if Potter did something as stupid as a direct assault.

For now, he truly doubted that he would need them. He had the advantage in words and ideas, and Potter was watching him with the same fascinated curiosity that Draco had seen people use when he first introduced them to the idea of buying a converted Dark artifact. They could walk away at any time. He didn't bind their limbs. They could disregard what he was saying at any time. He didn't chain their minds.

They were so busy congratulating themselves on their assumed freedoms, most of the time, that they didn't take account of the actual ones.

"I can offer you significance," Draco answered, watching Potter's eyes as they darted about and his feet as they fidgeted. He had seen it all before, and was prompted to smile tolerantly at it, but Potter would probably take that expression the wrong way, because he was capable of taking _anything _the wrong way. Draco therefore maintained his neutral expression and his flat tone. "No, it's not the same as continuing life. But it's a continuing reputation."

"So you're going to publicize what we find in the house?" Potter shook his head. "I don't think so. Either you'll want to keep it for yourself, or it'll concern Dark magic and you won't make it known for legal reasons."

Draco half-closed his eyes and drew in a thick breath of air that smelled sweet. Potter had spoken as though their investigating the house together was a real possibility, just when Draco had begun to think that he wouldn't do any such thing.

"I mean that you'll have a continuing reputation with me," he said. "And I'm good at careful editing. I could make sure that those who matter to you know the dangers you fought. Or I could give you leave to tell the story yourself, before you died, as long as you left out anything that could implicate me too much. You could have the adventure _and _the knowledge that they knew."

Potter's eyes fluttered shut for a moment. He stood there in contemplation so open that Draco didn't fear smiling, this time. Potter would be a pleasure to have around. Most of the people Draco knew and bargained with didn't let their emotions show on their faces. They thought of it as too much vulnerability. Draco knew why, and often felt the same himself, but as long as he could do it without danger, he preferred to feast on open feelings. Potter was an aesthetic masterpiece in that way.

_In that one way, _Draco thought, letting his eyes wander over Potter's ragged clothes and even more ragged hair. Though the green eyes were a nice touch.

Potter's eyes flared open, but Draco had seen that coming and wiped his face clean of anything that could be taken as mockery once more. "I'm tempted," Potter said, his honesty like a slap in the face from a brisk sea breeze. "But I'm not convinced that I'm the best companion you could have with you. Someone who's actually experienced in Dark magic might serve you better."

Draco ducked his head to hide the laughter. He would have to watch that, he thought. Usually he had better self-control than this, but Potter affected him, _tickled_ him, to the point where it was hard to keep his face calm and stern the way that he liked to.

"You're actually worrying about my safety, when I sought you out?" he asked, looking up.

Potter shrugged. "We don't know what's in there. My life is going anyway, but yours isn't. What if I went in there and survived, but you didn't? I would feel bad."

Draco had to consider that from a new angle, because he had taken it for granted that Potter would feel no compunctions about the death of an ancient rival. It was entirely possible that Draco had underestimated him.

_He may be a pleasure to have around in other ways as well. _

"I can take care of myself," he said. "Whatever we find in Bubonic, I am probably better-prepared to survive it than you are."

Potter gave him a bleak smile. "I would say so. I know who's going to be living a long time here, and it isn't me."

Draco raised his eyebrows. Potter would _not _be a pleasant companion if he was constantly moaning about his fate. But Draco was going to trust that he had chosen rightly and that Potter would not do such an asinine thing. Draco held out his hand and allowed a faint spark into his eyes. "Are we agreed?"

Potter stared at his outstretched hand the way he would probably stare at a snake dancing up to him. No, with more chagrin than that, Draco thought, remembering that Potter could speak Parseltongue. "I must be insane," he muttered.

Draco didn't let his eyes or his hand waver. He had made the choice, and turning his back on it now would be tantamount to doubting himself. He never did that, as a matter of principle.

Potter clasped his hand and shook it. Draco discovered another aesthetic pleasure as he did: Potter's fingers were long and slender, and despite the chewed state of the nails, didn't look less elegant for all that.

* * *

"Harry? Where did you go?"

Hermione was just starting to call for him when Harry wandered back into her upstairs library, more than a bit dazed. He and Malfoy had agreed on the details, including the time they would meet at Bubonic and the equipment and provisions they would bring with them. It had been an extremely business-like discussion, which Harry sensed Malfoy was good at.

And if he hadn't just agreed to spend part of his last few weeks gallivanting around a horridly enchanted house probably filled with Dark artifacts, Harry might even have thought it made sense.

_What have I done?_

Harry took a deep breath and shook his head, though. He wasn't _that _lost, _that _incapable of being in control of his actions. He wouldn't have made the agreement with Malfoy if he hadn't wanted to. That meant he had to come up with justifications for his friends and family rather than think of backing out of it.

"I went to speak with Malfoy," he said, sitting down in the chair he had occupied previously.

That brought Hermione out of her search for information on the Withering Curse as nothing else could have. She leaned forwards and stared at him. "What?" she breathed. "Harry, you did _what_?"

"I talked with him," Harry repeated. He focused his gaze on the window and pretended that he had to absorb the sight of all the sunlight he could, since it would be lost to him forever in a little while. "He sent me a letter earlier today that said he heard about my condition and thought I might want to join him in an adventure." Common sense dictated that he not tell Hermione what the "adventure" was like until he had won her around to the general idea. "I refused. But he came here and apologized for some of the language he used in the letter and made his case, and—and I agreed to go with him."

"Well, then we're _all _going with him, of course." Hermione's brow furrowed. "I don't know how we'll persuade Ron and Ginny, though. They still hate Malfoy as much as ever, and they'll probably focus on what he's doing rather than on what the adventure is supposed to be doing." She gave Harry a fleeting smile. "It will be like being back in Hogwarts. I reckon there's that to be said for it."

Harry smiled at her. He couldn't help it. The thought of them tramping into Bubonic together was ridiculous, but he was grateful that Hermione didn't immediately consider it so. "I don't think Malfoy would like it much if we all went with him," he said carefully. "He came because he thought I would enjoy the adventure and because he knows that I have Auror training. But you don't, and Ginny doesn't."

Hermione stared at him. Then she said, "Harry James Potter. You're proposing to go off alone with Draco Malfoy for your last days on earth?"

Harry shrugged. "I don't think it'll be _all _my last days on earth. Just a few. And what motive would Malfoy have for killing or hurting me now? He has to know that I'm suffering from a curse more violent than any he could get away with casting on me, and I'll die soon enough to satisfy him if he hates me."

Thinking back on the way that Malfoy had spoken to him during the interview in the library, Harry thought that it was highly likely Malfoy no longer hated him. The way he had spoken said that he was more concerned with business, and his strange knowledge of Harry, than anything else. Harry would have liked to know _how _Malfoy had come to know so much about him, of course. But it didn't matter. It mattered that he had introduced a challenge that sizzled along Harry's nerves and made him feel ready and competent, the way that simply sitting around the house didn't.

_I'm looking forward to rowing with him, even. _Harry shook his head when he thought about it. Malfoy might think it was only natural that Harry would want to die like an Auror and not like an Auror trainee, but it had its unnatural side.

"Harry."

It was unfair, but he had forgotten about Hermione's presence for a few minutes. When Harry returned to the present, he found Hermione standing in front of him, her fists clenched. Once she gestured as if she would like to take his hands, but she couldn't unfold her own.

"You can't do this," she said. "We need you here to take care of and say farewell to, and if I find something, I'll have to have you immediately available so that I can run any tests I need to run or cast any spells I need to cast. How can you go off with Malfoy on this—adventure, quest, whatever it is?"

Harry took a deep breath. "Because I feel like I'm wasting my time," he said quietly. "How many times can I say goodbye? How many times can I endure the fact that I'm leaving you, and dry someone else's tears? I want to help you, Hermione. I want to leave you with as many cheerful words as I can. But I also want to do something before I die. That's why I put that offer in the paper to help with charities, if someone could come up with a suitable one. Because it would make me feel like I wasn't dying in vain."

Hermione stared at him. Her eyes were open very wide, but Harry couldn't see any tears behind them. They just trembled, now and then, lashes and eyes both, as if the tears would fall.

Then she ducked her head and murmured, "Living with us, being with us, isn't enough to make you feel that way?"

Harry shook his head.

"Oh." Hermione didn't break out crying the way Harry had thought she would, or shouting the way Ron probably would have. She wilted back into the seat she'd risen from and stared down at her books. Harry waited, staring at the sunlight, for what she would say next.

"I never knew that," Hermione whispered. "I never knew that about you."

Harry shrugged. "I never really knew it about myself, either. But that's the way it is. I'm sorry, Hermione. I hope that you can help me explain it to the others," he added. He wasn't enthusiastic about the task that he had set himself, making Malfoy's proposal sound sensible to Ron and Ginny and then convincing them to stand back while he went off with Malfoy.

_Why did I want to do this, again?_

But he only knew that he wanted to, and he wasn't about to quarrel with his desires, strange as they might seem, on the eve of his death.

_Even if I want to think melodramatic thoughts phrased like "on the eve of my death," _Harry decided a minute later.

He shook his head and sighed. Malfoy had revealed one thing to him, at least, one thing Harry had to be grateful for: since he was going to die anyway, what mattered more than the fact of his death was how he met it. And he would meet it with his head held high and his wand blazing. He thought it best.

"If I say that I don't want to?" Hermione whispered.

It took Harry a moment to remember where he'd left the conversation and come back to realize what she was asking. He shook his head. "Then you don't," he said. "But I'll go on to Bubonic with Malfoy just the same."

"Bubonic?" Hermione shuddered all over, but her color was coming back and she looked interested, the way she always did when she thought some situation was more complex than she'd realized. "I think you'd better tell me everything."

Harry did, glad that he was making the announcement to her first. Hermione had always hated Malfoy with a more impartial hatred than Ron or Ginny had, since she didn't have a blood feud and tradition of loathing between families to influence her. It was strange, Harry thought, but personal insults mattered less to most wizards than doing things in the name of having always done them that way.

He didn't think he was like most wizards in that. He would do things just because they were new and different.

_Like this thing with Malfoy._

Harry dismissed the thought impatiently from his mind. Wrong decision or not, it was made.

* * *

Draco opened his father's diary for the relevant year and ran one finger down the spine, nodding approvingly. As thick as the book was, the leather hadn't yet started to crack. Lucius had tended to enchant more pages into the diary when he needed them, rather than starting a new one. He religiously began a new diary with the start of a year, and never before that, no matter how much the book creaked with content.

This had been the year that he got out of Azkaban, and, apparently, the year he went to Bubonic. He'd had a lot to put down.

Draco cast a spell that would find the curve of many capital letter B's in a row and then leaned back in his chair, eyes drifting half-shut. The spell would take some time to search the book. Draco could use the time to search his memory, in turn, and add anything to the list that he had made for himself and Potter.

But no matter how many times he went over it, everything seemed in place. They would take food, of course, and warm clothing, and blankets, and a parchment that inked itself into a map as one walked, and their wands, and some of Draco's changed artifacts that had a protective purpose. Draco reckoned he might offer Potter a trunk and extra blankets, but that was the only thing he could conceive of their needing or wanting. He expected Bubonic to be a harsh and wild place, like a foreign country, but not impossible to survive. His father had come out, after all.

_If changed, and sick._

Draco didn't intend to allow that to happen to him, which was one reason he was going to read everything in his father's diary that pertained to Bubonic.

A soft chime sounded; the spell had finished searching the book. Draco sat up, opened his eyes, and flipped to the first page, marked with a soft velvety snake's tail sticking out of it.

_June 19__th__, 2001. I must search out the secret of Bubonic. Pride went from me, sitting on the cold floor of that filthy cell. Conquering Bubonic would bring it back to me again._

Draco paused, tilting his head. He had never known that his father had suffered such a blow to his pride. Hatred against his captors and the biased system that had sent him to Azkaban he could see, but this?

Pondering, Draco read on, past the information about Bubonic that he already knew; Lucius had seemingly included it simply to remind himself of the dangers of venturing into the house. Then his own name leaped out of the page to startle him.

_I must consider the fortune I am leaving behind, whether to Draco or someone else. The "someone else" is the difficult part. My wife could inherit the fortune, but if she had another child, it would not be of Malfoy blood. My son is the one who should inherit it, by birth and talents, but he has involved himself in work that I cannot approve of, and there is a wildness in his soul that does not promise well to make a Malfoy of him._

Draco snorted and rolled his eyes. "Yes, Father, I was always a bit too uncontrolled for you, wasn't I?" He did have to wonder, though, if Lucius had disapproved of him sleeping with _many _men instead of with men in general. The tone of this comment made him think so. If Draco had settled down and acted the picture of wedded monogamy with someone, perhaps they could have been reconciled.

But Draco couldn't regret the lost chance for long. For one thing, if this was so important to Lucius, then he had never seen fit to communicate to Draco. For another, that wasn't _Draco_. He roamed from one lover to another because his desire would die down after a time and need rekindling. That was all.

He had had enough of changing himself to suit the requirements of other people, most notably the Dark Lord. He saw no reason to go on doing so now.

_There are distant cousins that I could seek out, the descendents of younger sons and daughters who could not inherit the Malfoy fortune in their time, but it is bad enough that my son would not be a worthy custodian of the money; I would rather not see someone who has never felt the touch of silk next to his skin spend it._

Draco rolled his eyes again and read patiently on, searching for details about the house. He wanted to find the page where his father had recorded the decision to enter it, or at least the details of what had happened while he was inside.

But there was neither of that. The diary went straight from Lucius's musings about what he should do with the Malfoy fortune and properties to a stretch of blank pages. Draco frowned as he flipped them. The spells his father used on the books meant that there were never blank pages left; Lucius used all there were and then added more, or, on the one occasion Draco could remember when he hadn't filled a book in a year, he had vanished the blank ones. What did these mean?

The next date was July 5th, and Lucius's hand was shaky. Draco had to bend close to the page and focus his eyes carefully to make it out.

_I have been through the darkness, and have reemerged into the light. While the Dark Lord and other figures in our history have acted as though Light and Dark are only convenient symbols for different kinds of magic and different states of mind, I can say now that that is not true. I have been through the darkness, and have reemerged into the light. I will jump at shadows for the rest of my life._

And then there were two other blank pages. When Draco turned them over, he found that the next date was the seventh of July and that Lucius was pondering what he should wear to dinner that night.

No matter how much further Draco looked through the book, he found nothing interesting or relevant. It seemed likely that Lucius had been in Bubonic through the last week of June and the first days of July, and also likely that he had not wanted to record what he found there.

Draco smiled. The challenge burned through his veins and made him salute the wall with his drink. Yes, he had a core of wildness in his soul, as his father had accused him. He would look forward to facing something that had frightened his father enough to induce such a strange alteration in his habits.

* * *

"You can't go with him, mate."

Harry shut the trunk and shrank it, then tucked it into his pocket. Ron had been saying the same thing for an hour now, and Harry didn't see why he should listen until and unless Ron could come up with a coherent argument.

"Mate, are you listening?" Ron's rough hand was on his shoulder, and Harry allowed himself to absorb the sensation for a moment. That was another thing, like the sunlight, that he would lose soon enough.

Then he told himself that he was wallowing in self-pity and turned around. Ron's face was so pale that Harry was afraid he might faint. He reached out and clasped Ron's shoulders, giving him a slight shake. "Ron. I'm going to be fine. Why would Malfoy choose _this _way to murder me, instead of just watching me die in agony from the Withering Curse? No, I think that I'll have more to fear from the curse than from him."

"He might have wanted the pleasure of killing you himself," Ron said stubbornly. His heartbeat was so fast that Harry could feel it shaking his body from the grip he had on Ron's shoulders. "I think he's furious that someone got there before he did."

Harry paused to think about that. Remembering the way that Malfoy had sometimes acted when they were in school together, he could see that, but—

No. He shook his head again. In the end, he couldn't believe it of Malfoy. Malfoy had changed, Harry had seen that for himself the other day. He valued other things now. He knew that Malfoy might want to kill him, but he wouldn't want his life ruined by the accusations and imprisonment that would follow. Harry really did think that Malfoy thought more of himself than Harry, and that meant his obsession had to be less powerful than his self-interest.

"I'll be fine," he repeated, and stepped away from Ron, giving him a quick smile before he picked up his wand.

"But you should have stayed with us," Ron said, trailing Harry downstairs. "Gin's going to be heartbroken."

Harry hesitated. He hadn't told Ron and Hermione about this yet, partially because he'd thought they had enough to worry them, but he wondered if it was a bad thing to go to his death with this kind of secret between them. _Probably, _he decided, and turned around.

"I'd mostly decided to call it quits with Ginny already," he said. "She and I—we weren't working together. And you must have noticed that we weren't spending much time together in the last few months."

Ron blinked. "But you and her—you were going to get married," he muttered, in the tones of a child who'd lost a sweet.

Harry shook his head. "She's a great girl, Ron, but we can't—be. It doesn't work, the way it works with you and Hermione."

Ron took a swift step backwards and lifted his hand. "I don't need to hear details of my sister's sex life, thanks, mate," he said hastily.

Harry smiled in spite of himself. Yes, that was Ron all over. "I mean in other ways than the sex," he said. "You and Hermione can row and talk and laugh together. Ginny and I couldn't do that. We did try. It was more my fault than hers. But it didn't work out."

Ron looked at him doubtfully. Harry tried to look as sincere and as troubled as he could be. It really wasn't that hard to look troubled, when he thought about it. He did wish that things had worked out with Ginny. She was someone familiar and comfortable, and maybe they could have found a way to be together with more practice.

But they wouldn't have that time, now.

Ron sighed like a hissing kettle and shook his head. "All right, mate. You have the right to decide for yourself what you want to do. I know that. It just—if you're sure that you want to go with Malfoy, I can't stop you."

Harry clapped Ron on the shoulder. In the end, what made his friends friends was that they stood by each other. He had supported Ron when he confessed that he wasn't sure he wanted to marry Hermione yet in their first year of Auror training, and Hermione when she had left Ron for a short time to live on her own and work on her own and see if she liked that better. In the end, she had wanted to live with Ron but work in separate rooms, and Harry had helped donate the money and the magic so they could build those rooms.

_I shouldn't have feared telling them so much, _he thought as he followed Ron down the stairs. _In the end, they're still beside me, and I never receive the sense that they really want to be anywhere else. _

_For now, at least._

* * *

"Malfoy."

Potter's face was flat and closed. He turned around and stared up at the Manor as though he was remembering all the things he had suffered there. Draco restored his attention to where it should be—on him—by touching Potter's arm.

_You would think that someone had shocked him, _Draco thought in amusement, as he watched Potter leap into the air like a cat and then land, turning with his eyes so big that he seemed about to lose them. Draco sighed delicately and shook his head. "I don't live in the Manor anymore, Potter," he said. "I only suggested it as a convenient place to meet. You don't need to look as though the gates are going to swallow you."

"I don't look that way," Potter denied automatically, but Draco didn't see how he could be sure, since he couldn't see his own face. Before they could get into a stimulating row, though, he resumed the flat look again. "Where is Bubonic? Were you going to tell me the Apparition coordinates? I expected you'd owl them to me."

Draco sighed. "And reveal the location of the house when you might have chosen not to come? Of course not, Potter." He did hope that Potter's magical power was enough to make up for his loss of intelligence. He had seemed more complex when they met in Weasley and Granger's house.

Potter blinked at him. "Isn't that a bit paranoid, Malfoy?"

Draco rolled his eyes, but he felt a bit reassured. So it wasn't that Potter was stupid, only that he didn't understand pure-blood norms. Well, Draco could accept that in someone like him, who had grown up with Muggles and who wasn't pure-blood even by the standards of lax people. "No," he said. "If you knew where the house was and wanted to betray me, then you could do a bit of damage to my profit and my standing. Particularly once you know the route inside the house."

Potter gave him a long, steady look, but it wasn't until he spoke that Draco understood it. "No, I can't, Malfoy. I'm dying, remember?"

Draco gave a little toss of his head. Somehow he had forgotten that, and he disliked both the fact of his forgetting, something careless that should not be permitted, and the thought of Potter dying. "Well. There is such a thing as writing and hidden letters left for anyone who wants to read them."

Potter sighed patiently and extended his arm. "Just get us out of here, then, and to the house."

Draco found himself trying to evaluate whether the arm he took was actually thinner than it had been yesterday, when he met Potter to speak to him. Then he shook his head. Of course it wasn't. The Withering Curse acted more slowly than that.

But it was going to be a different world, without Potter in it. It was as if a smaller, second sun would be removed and snuffed out.

_A lesser world. _

Draco told himself not to jump to conclusions, and closed his eyes, fixing the Apparition coordinates in his mind. One breath, then another, and he leaped with Potter to Bubonic.

* * *

Harry stared at the house. It was smaller than he had expected, built of dark wood, and it hunched on the ground. The area around it seemed tangled and wild, dead trees intermingling with small live ones and scrubby, withered grass.

Then he moved to the side and realized that the house had fooled him. It wasn't small; it sprawled out on the ground so far that Harry couldn't tell where it ended and the small, shady forest behind it began. Because it wasn't more than one floor, he had demoted it in his mind, but yes, it was large.

And he could feel the Dark magic that prickled along his skin from it down here.

Malfoy gave him a faint, superior smile. He looked like the house, in some ways, Harry thought, arrogant with power and more beneath the surface than he appeared at first glance.

"Shall we?" he asked, sweeping one hand towards the house.

Harry nodded shortly and followed him. He had come too far, and argued too much with his friends, to turn back now, at the first hurdle.


	3. The Room of Signs

Thank you again for all the reviews!

_Chapter Three—The Room of Signs_

Draco had, for some reason, expected the key to stick in the lock when he tried to turn it. But nothing of the sort happened. It turned as smoothly as though someone had used oil on it, or on the lock, and the door of Bubonic popped open.

Draco stepped inside first. Potter trod cautiously behind him, his wand practically poking Draco in the back, his hot breath rasping over Draco's neck.

Despite the way he wanted to hunch his shoulders and move away from that, Draco forced himself to stand and look around instead. The room in front of him was long and low and dim, but even before he called a _Lumos _Charm to his wand, he could see the row of pillars that ran down the middle of it. He wondered if they actually supported the roof. He rather doubted it.

When the light flared up, Potter started, and Draco had the feeling he was trying to suppress a shout. Draco frowned. _I hope he's not paranoid, _he thought, as he looked around. _Or that the Withering Curse doesn't have some unanticipated side-effect that would mean he's going to start lashing out at shadows long before he should._

He wondered for a moment if they might stay in the house long enough for the curse to start destroying Potter. He grimaced. He might find it hard, even given his money and contacts, to escape a murder accusation if that happened.

_Perhaps I should be grateful that Potter publicized his condition._

The room did indeed have a double row of wooden pillars, twisted in corkscrew shapes the way Draco remembered the posts of his parents' bed being. The wood was a deep brown, smeared with splashes of an even darker color running through it like veins through marble. Draco reached out and let his hand rest on the nearest pillar. The wood was cool and smooth beneath his fingertips, but not unusually so in either case.

Then the wood shuddered slightly. Draco pulled his hand back at once and whirled around, settling himself in the right position for casting if he needed to.

"What did you do?" Potter hissed, close enough to his ear to be pleasant if Draco had been in any other mood, in any other place.

Draco shook his head slightly, refusing the ridiculous question, and watched intently as the wood on the pillar rippled where he had touched it, shimmering and turning lazy spirals that ultimately melted into a new carving. Or what seemed to be a carving, Draco admitted to himself. He didn't know whether his touching it had called it to the surface or whether it was a natural reaction of the wood to his magic.

_Whichever it was, perhaps it would be best not to touch things in this room in the future without premeditation._

That thought reminded Draco of the fact that he hadn't discovered how big the room actually was. He glanced quickly into the distance, between the rows of pillars, but couldn't see the end in the dim and glowing light. He turned back to the pillar and studied the symbol there, though he had already seen that he didn't know it.

"Let me see," Potter said, and leaned forwards over his shoulder. Draco raised his eyebrows and stood there without shifting, because he didn't know why Potter should be allowed to dictate his movements. Besides, since he didn't recognize the symbol immediately, he might feel the resemblance stir in his mind if he waited.

The symbol resembled a backwards question mark without the dot beneath it, though the bend was a bit sharper than what Draco normally saw in a question mark. It was raised from the wood, and Draco could see the surface of the mark, although not the rest of the pillar, gleaming as if from sweat. He grimaced. He had the unpleasant feeling that he had just given the house a taste of his magic, and that it was it savoring it.

"Bloody fantastic, Malfoy," Potter said, sounding resigned. "What did you do now?"

Draco leaned back in response, so that he could crowd Potter out of the way. Fit muscles and solid arms, he noted as Potter moved, reluctantly. You would never know that he was sick if he hadn't mentioned it.

"I don't know," he said, and moved on to the next pillar in the row. Potter drifted behind him, looking out of sorts.

The next pillar bore an amorphous pattern that might, for all Draco knew, be meant to represent a cloud formation, or a new continent. He leaned as near to it as he could, running all the symbols he knew through his mind. One could consider Bubonic a huge Dark artifact, and there were only so many decorations that a wizard who wanted to intimidate others would think to ornament his possessions with.

But he didn't recognize it, and he stepped back with an irritated little hiss at last, and moved on to the next one.

* * *

Harry snorted. He felt a little better now that it was obvious that Malfoy didn't know some of the basic Auror facts that had been pounded into Harry's head from the beginning of his training. It made him feel like he could contribute _something _to this mission besides following Malfoy around and staring over his shoulder.

He had to contribute to it. It was his last chance.

Harry took a deep, careful breath and decided that he was going to ignore any thoughts like that for now. He examined the symbols that appeared after that: what looked like the outline of half a human body, a pair of foreshortened parallel lines, and an odd thing that could have been part of an hourglass. The symbols also appeared on the pillars on the other side, along with the bent bow-thing and what looked like a cloud to Harry. He hadn't seen them before, and found himself shaking his head in confusion when the pattern began to repeat.

"You don't know what they are?" he asked the back of Malfoy's head.

"Would I be standing here with this baffled expression on my face if I did?" Malfoy asked dryly.

"You're turned away from me," Harry pointed out, more irritated than he should have been, he knew, by the fact that Malfoy was demonstrating that he was the same stupid git he had always been.

Malfoy turned around, but he had already wiped the baffled expression and put on a patient one. "No, I don't know what it is," he said. "I suspect that the signs together form a larger system, and interpreting it would give us the clue of this room." He reached out, and Harry drew in his breath to shout just in case he touched one of the pillars again, but Malfoy let his fingers hover above the smooth wood instead. "I can make guesses, but they will not be accurate ones."

Harry waited, but Malfoy only went on staring at the pillar, as if it was more worthy of attention than the living, breathing person who just happened to share the room with him. He cleared his throat noisily.

Malfoy gave the kind of abstracted jump that Hermione did when she sank too deeply into contemplation. Harry eyed Malfoy's back and snorted a bit. He wasn't sure that he _believed _Malfoy's supposed absorption into his investigation, but he would let it pass for now.

"I think that these must relate to the Dark artifact that I expect to find in the depths of the house," Malfoy said, and this time he did close his fingers around the nearest pillar, the one that bore the sign of a cloud formation, or whatever it was. Harry hissed, but the wood did nothing. "Such symbols can be used as advertisements, warnings, or smug boasts from one Dark wizard to another."

"What?" Harry blinked. That was something Auror training hadn't covered. Of course, Aurors finding Dark artifacts were supposed to hand them over to the Department of Mysteries instead of trying to handle them themselves. "'I have more power than you do, ha ha ha?'"

Malfoy gave him an obscure look, something tugging at the corner of his mouth that might have been a smile. "I'm sure that some of them would put it more dramatically. With more laughter."

Harry shook his head. Before today, he wouldn't have thought that Malfoy could take a joke about Dark wizards. "All right, fine. But why put the symbols here, a long way from whatever artifact Bubonic conceals?"

Malfoy bowed his head and stood still as though someone had asked him a troublesome question—or an interesting one, Harry reckoned. He seemed as if he would stand there for some time, in fact, so Harry leaned forwards and looked around him, into the distance between the rows of pillars.

The dim glow that stretched from Malfoy's wand, and from his now that Harry thought to light it, didn't reveal as much as it seemed it should have. There looked to be a solid wall at the back of the room that absorbed light. Or was that a different kind of light that did that, Harry wondered, or even a smoke or fog? The Charms simply didn't reveal enough to tell.

"I think that the whole house may be the artifact," Malfoy said at last, making Harry jump. "It would explain why my father took damage from it. I could see him resisting a surprise attack—which wouldn't be a surprise when he knew more about the house's nature than I do—or preparing for an encounter with an enemy concealed in the distance. But scars on his lungs speak to a different order of pain, and of attack." He looked up at the ceiling, and Harry could see the way his eyes shone. "Imagine the ceiling and the walls around us, even the pillars and the symbols, as small pieces of clockwork in the bowels of a vast machine, Potter," he whispered. "Isn't it fascinating?"

"I prefer not to think about _bowels_, if you don't mind," Harry said, giving another quick glance around. At this point, he would have liked mysterious threatening noises better than this vast silence. "It makes me envision monsters."

"And marching down the monster's throat?" Malfoy shook his head, his hair swaying around but not obscuring his superior, smug smile. "That's not going to happen to us."

"Us," Harry muttered, but so quietly that he didn't think Malfoy heard him. Malfoy had gone back to examining the walls around them with an air of absorption that suggested he wouldn't hear anything outside his head for the next little while. Harry raised his voice, though, because he didn't want to lose Malfoy to his thoughts. "What makes you think so?"

"Because of who you are," Malfoy said, glancing at him with an odd expression, as if he thought that Harry had asked for something incredibly basic to be explained, instead of something puzzling, "and because of who I am." Then he marched off into the dim light, towards that dim wall, or fog, or whatever it was, at the far end.

Harry followed because he had no choice, but already he was starting to seriously consider whether they would be able to survive Bubonic—Harry because the Withering Curse would kill him if nothing else did, and Malfoy because Harry would probably kill _him_.

But at least it was different from sitting at home waiting to die. Harry had to admit that much, at least.

* * *

Despite his confident words to Potter, Draco already knew that Bubonic, if artifact it was, was like nothing he had encountered before.

Artifacts responded hostilely or not at all to the touch of foreign wizards. In one sense, Draco's touching of the pillars had been foolish beyond measure, but in another, it was a foolproof test. It should have shown Draco what kind of protections he was facing, and the changed artifacts he carried about his body should have been enough to deflect any outraged energies the house could issue.

But the pillar had showed him the sign, and then done nothing else. Draco had to admit that he didn't understand _that_. If the signs were a warning of some sort, they weren't effective in warning away wizards who might try to steal Bubonic if no one understood them.

Of course, perhaps they meant something to whatever ancestor of his had built or bought the house, but Draco didn't think so. Lucius would have left a record of the symbols in his diary. They were something he would probably have known about before venturing into the house, and therefore not subject to whatever strange twist of mind had kept him from writing about his experiences inside Bubonic.

The other strong possibility he was considering at the moment was that Bubonic had recognized him as the rightful owner of it, due to his Malfoy blood, and offered him the signs as a greeting.

But Draco had to shake his head when he thought about that. Once again, it was not in the nature of Dark artifacts to do something like that. If they remained for a long time without a proper owner who attended to them and understood them, the way that Bubonic had, then they reverted to essentially "wild" status and would attack when touched.

Thoughtful, he marched his way between the pillars, noting from the corner of his eye that they signs repeated again and again on the pillars they passed. Apparently his touch on the first one had been enough to awaken them all, or make them sprout, or whatever the proper term for their emergence from the wood was.

Draco smiled. Though he was more baffled than he had let on to Potter, he was also excited. It was always good to be reminded that he didn't know everything about his chosen field of study, and that meant he had more to work with, more to explore, and less chance of getting bored with what would be his life's task.

The room ended at last, culminating in a large wooden wall with a single door set into it. The door bore all the symbols Draco had seen so far—bent curve, cloud formation, parallel lines, half a human, and the part of an hourglass. They were arranged in a circle around a new pair that had appeared in the center.

Draco bent closer. The human figures there were done in crude outlines, like the one that had shown up in the symbols, but around the head of one clustered scribbled squiggles that unmistakably reflected Potter's wild hair.

Draco smiled, slowly. The artifact that was Bubonic was alert in ways that he had not seen in a long time, then. _Interesting. _He spent a moment tapping his finger on the air a few inches from the drawings, and then moved back. Potter had already seen them, if the indrawn breath from behind Draco was any indication. Draco thought it best that he not try to hide them.

"That's us," Potter said, and he actually did reach out as if he would touch them. Draco caught his wrist, and found the skin dry and burning. He reminded himself, again, that he wouldn't actually be able to _feel _any signs of the Withering Curse in Potter's skin, no matter what he thought.

"Yes, it is," Draco said. "I suspect that my touch on the pillar awakened the spirit that dwells here." He glanced around, but of course the spirit, if that was it, showed no sign of its passage. The doors seemed to shiver in front of him, but if what Draco suspected was true, that was hardly unusual, for Bubonic to react to a mention of itself.

"Are you _mad_?" Potter's voice cracked. "Are you going to do something like that again? Am I going to have to fight to defend you before we've been in here an hour?"

Draco laughed. "It might have been longer than an hour. I have the feeling that time is subjective, in Bubonic." He wished there was some way he could be certain. That would assist him in determining what kind of artifact it was.

He had expected Potter to react to that with an insult or outrage, as appropriate, or at least a mocking challenge asking how Draco could _know _if time was that bloody subjective. Instead, Potter's face shut. "So twelve days might pass without one being aware of them," he said, softly, as though talking to someone else.

Draco rolled his eyes, more irritated with himself than Potter. He should have seen that of course the git's self-preoccupation would lead him back to thinking about the Withering Curse, instead of keeping his mind in the present. Arguments with an old enemy had to be less important to him than his own health.

Draco did not know if he would have felt the same things in the same position, but then, he would never have been stupid enough to become an Auror and put himself in the way of the Withering Curse in the first place, so he didn't think his experience and Potter's were comparable.

"Yes, that might happen," he said. "But I doubt it. And our experience is more likely to be subjective and uncertain the further we get into Bubonic, rather than near the door." Automatically, he glanced over his shoulder to see if he could gauge the distance to the door, and then shook his head when he saw only the dim corridor between the pillars. He had known that would happen. Forgetting was worthy only of a third-year student at Hogwarts. Or perhaps a Gryffindor first-year.

"Why does it matter where we are in the house?" Potter had gone back to staring at the image of himself on the door as if he had never seen anything more horrifying.

"Because of spiritual biogeography," Draco said.

As he had known they would, the words pulled Potter's head around. That was part of the point; Draco didn't intend to spend all his time with someone moping and talking about death. If he could stir Potter's curiosity, it would at least _resemble _lecturing to an appreciative audience.

"What?" Potter demanded, softly but so hard that flecks of spit launched themselves across the distance between them and landed on Draco's cheek. He wiped them off with the back of a single fastidious hand, glaring at Potter.

Potter had the good grace to look abashed, but didn't back down. "What do you mean?" he demanded. "What's spiritual bio-whatever?"

"Biogeography," Draco said delicately. "It refers to the distribution of different spiritual and magical aspects inside an artifact as large as this one, or inside a place that's been filled and manipulated with magic over the centuries, like Hogwarts. Surely you noticed that the dungeons were colder at Hogwarts than the rest of the school?"

Potter frowned. Draco had to admit that he looked attractive when he was thinking. "I just thought that was because they were underground," he said, sweeping hair off his scar. _Even here, he can't go an hour without making someone notice it, _Draco thought, but he had the feeling that it really was an unconscious gesture for Potter. "Closer to the lake."

Draco shook his head. "Dark Arts have been used there more often over the centuries than in other parts of Hogwarts," he said. "The spells have sunk into the stone. And there are more powerful wards there, too, left to guard artifacts like the Chamber of Secrets. In the spiritual biogeography of the place, it can't be as warm as, say, Gryffindor Tower undoubtedly was."

Potter swallowed. His throat bobbed in interesting ways. "And so time will pass more quickly further in Bubonic than here?"

Draco nodded. Potter gave his own glance back at the door they'd entered by, and Draco knew what he was thinking as clearly as if he'd announced it.

"No," he said, "I don't think you'll die in here. I never would have invited you along if I thought that. There would no doubt have been questioning of _some _kind, _someone _wanting to try me for Harry Potter's murder."

* * *

Harry blinked. He hadn't thought Malfoy would be so honest about his own motives for wanting to stay clear of the law and any action that might cast suspicion on him.

But the honesty was refreshing, too. _Here's someone who doesn't care, _Harry thought, his body relaxing. _He doesn't want me to die while I'm with him, but other than that, he's indifferent to my death. So I can act like I am, too, instead of _only _thinking about it and feeling horrid if I don't._

"All right, then," he said. "How do we open the door?"

"_We_," Malfoy said in mild contempt, but he bent down and stretched his fingers out so they hovered above the door, closing his eyes. Harry watched the lines of his face smooth out. He cocked his head as though listening to music in a trance, and murmured a few words Harry didn't think were English or Latin.

Looking at him like this, Harry could see why he had acquired his formidable reputation as a dealer of artifacts. There seemed to be nothing he couldn't handle, nothing he would balk at.

_That could have its bad side, too, _Harry cautioned himself. _Don't caught up in the romance of the quest and forget everything else._

"I'll need help," Malfoy said, but before Harry could step forwards and open the door, Malfoy took what looked like a long-handled silver spoon from a slit in his robe Harry would have sworn was too small to conceal it. Malfoy tapped his fingers against the handle, and a tiny, thin blade slid out of the bowl of the spoon. Harry moved a step away and cast a spell that ought to tell him what magical properties the spoon had; he didn't want Malfoy accidentally stabbing him with it, if he was working with his eyes closed.

"The help of that?" Harry asked. He tried to keep his voice from squeaking, but it didn't work. He cleared his throat and was about to try again when he saw the slow, steady way Malfoy's head moved, in a nod that made it seem as if he was balancing the weight of boulders on his neck.

"Yes. Shhhh, Potter."

The simple words shouldn't have been so effective. Harry felt the need to interfere pushing him. His spell had returned no answer, simply fading in blue sparks around the spoon. He _should _interfere rather than simply let Malfoy use a magical artifact of unknown potency and character in front of him.

But Malfoy's words soothed him, and he found himself moving out of the way and waiting passively for results before he thought about it.

Malfoy murmured more of the unknown words in what sounded like a question. His fingers slid up and down the handle of the spoon, and lingered on the blade. Then he thrust it forwards at the images that dominated the doors.

The images stretched out towards the spoon, yearning, with sparks and spirals of golden light. The spoon reflected the spirals, and the ghostly twin of them rose around the blade, adding an edge to it so thin that Harry had to keep blinking in order to see it. Unhesitating, Malfoy pushed the spoon, or whatever it was, straight into the center of the light.

It dissolved, running down the sides of the metal handle like water. Malfoy smirked at nothing and tossed up his spoon, catching it handily. By the time it landed in his hand, the blade had withdrawn into the bowl.

Harry licked his lips and found himself speaking in a croak. "What-what was that? I know you can change magical artifacts, but what did you change that one into?"

Malfoy, with his hand on the doors, paused and looked back at him with a faint half-smile. Harry's heart hammered, and he hardly knew why. Perhaps it was because he had rarely seen such a mysterious expression, even with that quiet edge to Malfoy's eyes and smile.

"I made it into a weapon that could cut through illusion, through magic, through barriers," Malfoy said softly. "As I believe you saw." He pushed, and the doors slid open with a hiss and creak that made them sound as if they had been powered by steam. He went through, one hand briefly trailing along the images on the door, brushing over the one that looked like a bent bow.

"What was it before you changed it, then?" Harry panted as he ducked after him, coming up in the center of a corridor beyond the doors. He glanced back, and of course the doors were already gone, although a dim red fog hung there, illuminated by blue-flaming torches that glowed on the walls and lent it an eerie effect.

"Nothing you would recognize." Malfoy was examining this second room with a cold, critical eye, and his voice was abstracted. Harry turned away from the place where the doors had been, trying not to wonder how they would get out again, and studied the room.

It was enormous, made of black marble blocks veined with silver, or at least it looked like that. Here and there, a reflection flashed back at Harry, and when he squinted, he could see shards of mirror embedded in the stone. He wondered what purpose the room had originally been built for, and why.

_Or is this even the same room that we would have found if we hadn't used an artifact to open the doors? Maybe the house changes around the places it lets you enter based on the way you come in._

Harry shuddered, and then rubbed his arms briskly. He could do without speculations like that, thank you, in case it made him too uneasy to sleep at night.

_Whatever night means here._

The blue torches cast streams of light like twin moon-paths across the marble. Malfoy studied both of them, and then began to walk down the stretch of stone exactly between them, making sure that his feet didn't touch the streams. Harry followed him gingerly.

"Why can't we touch the light?" he asked.

"Because I would have expected darkness here," Malfoy said, not glancing back at him. "A side-effect of my weapon is that it _enforces _darkness on the other side of whatever you use it to open. If this had been a door that led outside, we would have stepped into a haze that would prevent us from seeing the sun. This light is therefore unusual."

_Or bloody fucking terrifying, _Harry thought uneasily, casting a glance at the torches. In the end, he focused straight ahead, and tried not to think about the mirrors that sometimes showed glimpses of them passing, or the coldness of the floor.

Or the itching in his feet that had started up almost the moment they stepped onto the marble. He was sure that Malfoy wouldn't want to hear about such a trivial thing.

* * *

So far, Draco thought, Bubonic was more irritatingly incomprehensible than anything else.

He knew of no artifact that should have reacted with light to the darkness his weapon usually produced, especially not this kind of light. It resembled the flames that Draco had seen burn from driftwood, but it was without heat, and the flames never flickered. The paths of radiance they laid out were absolutely straight. He wondered if Potter had noticed that yet. Probably not. He noticed nothing unless he had to.

And the mirrors. Draco had been starting to think he understood what class of artifacts Bubonic was akin to-the dwelling artifacts, the kind that would provide temporary homes-but none of those had mirrors.

He kept one eye on the glasses as he and Potter proceeded between them, but saw nothing more unusual than their flashing robes and faces. He thought that if an attack came, it would come from that direction. Bubonic would expect them to be on the defensive, and might think the mirrors were less vulnerable than the walls or floor; there were so many that Potter and Draco couldn't watch them all at once.

If it was right to speak of Bubonic as _thinking_. Draco frowned and shook his head. There were tests that he could perform to determine Bubonic's nature, but he had been waiting to perform them, lest he be forced into a defensive posture too soon.

But their survival was more important than impressing Potter, or even Bubonic. Draco reached into his robe collar and removed the round pendant that dangled there at the end of a thick iron chain. The chain should have scratched his skin, or so numerous people who saw it had told him, but it never did.

Draco breathed on the pendant and tossed it into the air. It hung there, sparking, and Potter came to a step and sucked in a single startled breath.

"What's that?" he whispered. "I've seen something like it before."

Draco turned back. Potter's voice had changed. Once again he thought of the Withering Curse, and once again, he answered himself that it couldn't have started yet. Honestly, he was getting as bad as Potter's friends.

But when he caught sight of Potter's face, his senses sharpened. He did, in fact, look awful. His cheeks were pale, the bones straining against the skin as if they would break through. His hands clenched and wriggled in place as though he was fighting down pain. And his feet were shuffling and tapping up and down, up and down.

"What's the matter with you?" Draco asked. "That's the question we should be asking."

Potter stared at him. "What do you mean? Nothing's the matter with me." Then he shivered and scratched his arms violently.

His fingers went through his skin like knives through parchment, leaving long, bloody furrows.

Draco expected Potter to scream, but he didn't. He clamped his mouth shut instead, and breathed noisily through his nose. Then he closed his eyes, hissed through the tiny space left open in his lips, and said, "What should we do?"

Draco bent close to the scratches in Potter's arms without answering. Potter's hands were twitching, and Draco knew that, doubtless, he was trying to resist the urge to scratch at other portions of his body, lest the same thing happen to them.

"Hold steady," he whispered. A quiet voice could sometimes be the same as a calm one, at least to people afflicted with pain who reacted well otherwise. "I have to be sure of what we're dealing with before I move."

When he glanced up, he saw that Potter had let his eyelashes fall shut and was once again breathing through his nose, less noisily than before. Draco tilted his head in respect. He didn't know where Potter had learned such self-mastery, but it would make his task, which had to be conducted in silence if he was going to learn much of anything useful, infinitely easier.

* * *

The itching was the worst part. If he had ever pictured an injury of this kind, Harry would have said it was the pain, but no. Despite what had already happened, the itching that had invaded his shoulders and his hands and his feet and his _face _was of the kind that he wanted to relieve by scratching. Only the vision of his skin peeling away from his cheekbones and forehead kept his hands at his sides.

Well, that and Malfoy's unexpected authority, his expertise, his use of _we_. What "we're" dealing with, he had said, as though Harry's problem was his own, as though he wasn't about to snap at Harry for being useless and infected.

_Of course, he might if he knew how long I had been feeling the itching, _Harry thought, and focused his eyes on the wall over Malfoy's head. The pendant Malfoy had tossed into the air was shining steadily now, diffusing a light that the black marble fought with but couldn't absorb. Harry could make out more of the room.

It was no more welcoming than the first one they had stepped into, the room with the long row of pillars. At least it wasn't as dim, thanks to Malfoy's pendant. Long, slender scratches that reminded Harry of drawings of insect legs scrawled over the walls. Here and there were empty torch sconces, made of some cold metal, iron or perhaps silver. (Harry shuddered as the itching almost escaped his control, but he imagined his hands held in _Incarcerous _ropes and that helped, a bit). The veins of silver he had noted in the marble before were more vivid now, seeming almost to peel free of the stone.

Harry focused on them, maybe just because they were so similar to what his skin wanted to do now, and so he saw them moving.

"Malfoy," he whispered, staring so that he could be sure of his tricky vision. Yes, the veins of silver undulated back and forth, waving like seaweed trapped by a powerful current. The walls reflected their thin shadows, even, at least in the burning light of the pendant.

"Hold still, Potter." Malfoy sounded like one of the Healers who had cast the spells on Harry that confirmed the Withering Curse, holding down an impulse to snarl under a mask of exquisite serenity.

"There's something on the walls that you should see," Harry said. "Something that must be connected to this somehow." He flinched as a sharp brand of itching sliced down the back of his left hand. It _burned. _He _had _to get rid of it.

He raised his hand. He was going to use his teeth. That was less damaging than fingernails. It had to be. He had to get rid of it somehow.

"_Incarcerous._"

His hands flew behind him, tied together with the ropes that Malfoy had conjured. Harry uttered a low sound that twisted his voice in ways he didn't recognize. He would have said that only werewolves could growl, if asked, but here he was, making precisely that sound, and Malfoy only gave him a flat look and shook his head.

"No," he said. "I won't allow you to scratch yourself to death. Your skin's become an inadequate covering. Even a rubbing touch might tear it." He leaned back and looked suddenly thoughtful. "No, wait. Perhaps only _your _touch. My ropes didn't abrade your wrists." He leaned close to the rents in Harry's arms and whispered something Harry couldn't hear, but it made a sharp tingling run up the wounds.

"Ah," Malfoy said. "It has something to do with the nature of the room we're in. This must be one of the diseases of the body that Bubonic can create."

"I _told _you that," Harry said with exaggerated patience. "Would you _look at the bloody wall _and tell me what you see?" His eyes shot up, wondering if the house was devious enough to have stopped the motion of the silver tendrils, but they were still there and waving.

Malfoy turned around, with an expression on his face in profile that Harry thought meant he was just humoring Harry, but went still when he saw the tendrils that had formerly been veins in marble. He waved his wand through several abrupt patterns and cursed quietly at the end of them, whirling back to Harry.

"We have to break the connection between you and the room," he said. "But it's far too large to run through, and doing such a thing would eliminate our ability to understand Bubonic."

Harry bit his lip to stifle the impulse to laugh-where were Malfoy's priorities?-and gasped in soundless pain as that motion peeled away the whole of his lip. Malfoy picked up the strip of skin and flung it aside. He was tense but still balanced, his eyes moving rapidly back and forth between Harry and the wall.

"This is probably going to hurt," Malfoy said candidly.

The itching had crawled up behind Harry's eyeballs, and he was glad that his hands were restrained. He could too easily envision himself clawing his eyes out. He met Malfoy stare for stare and said, "Do what you need to do."

* * *

Though he tried desperately not to show it, Draco was impressed.

Potter was acting _rational_. Draco had expected him to be either noble or stupid, perhaps insisting that Draco leave him there and run away on his own, or at least to scream and complain the whole time. Those who were all bravery on the surface were often children in the face of true pain.

But Potter merely shut his eyes and stood there, waiting for Draco to do what he had to do to break the connection.

Draco drew out another artifact from a robe packet, a small silver pouch of what would look like ordinary salt to anyone else. He was a bit worried that he had already had cause to use three of his artifacts this early in the journey, but that was the nature of Bubonic, and the thought filled him with an almost sexual excitement as well. If he could tame the house, then it would make a far more powerful addition to his store than any of the ones he had used so far.

He had to move quickly. He glanced over his shoulder one more time and picked out the lowest of the mass of moving tendrils, the ones that he actually stood some chance of reaching with the altered salt. Then he opened the mouth of the pouch into a narrow funnel, so that the "salt" would go only where he directed it.

He gave one more glance at Potter, who stared at him, tense and sweating, his hands twitching in their bonds, but still didn't yield, didn't cry out, didn't surrender.

Draco shivered in the wake of his feelings from that and then spun in a circle, tossing the salt first on those lowest veins sticking out from the walls and then on the wounds torn in Potter's arms. At the same time, he whipped his wand forwards and then back, and cried out, "_Corium novum!_"

Several things happened at once. The tendrils stopped moving. The wounds in Potter's arms shimmered dimly, as Draco's altered salt fought with the Dark magic holding them open. Potter sagged to his knees with a scream.

And Potter's skin turned inside out, flew away from him, changed as it whirled through the next cascade of salt Draco tossed, and then came down to snugly enwrap Potter again.

It happened so fast that Draco would have had no idea what he was seeing if he hadn't been the one who cast the spell. Most wizards couldn't survive more than an instant or two without their skin, after all.

But the spell had worked the way Draco intended it to. The skin, turned inside out and transformed a moment after the connection with the room was broken, had no itching beneath it; all the itching had been on the bottom side of the old skin. Potter was himself again, wounded, panting, changed, but fixable.

Draco calmly healed the wounds in his arms with another pinch of salt and a minor, murmured Healing Charm. Then he released the ropes from Potter's arms and stepped back.

"How do you feel?" he asked.

* * *

Harry wanted to laugh, punch Malfoy in the mouth, claw away the wrong-feeling skin, and run in the other direction, all at once.

How did he _feel_? Flayed, stripped, exposed with his muscles and organs visible to the world for a single moment that his mind had already started to blur because of the agony involved, and then with the itching gone-

How was he supposed to feel?

But when Harry glanced up, he realized that Malfoy had asked the question with a kind of professional interest, and was watching him with much the same. He wasn't expected to lie and respect Malfoy's feelings, the way he would have with his friends, the way he'd had to reassure and calm them through their grief. He could speak the truth.

"Bloody awful," he said. "Like I'm going to be sick in a minute, and need a lie-down after that." He scrubbed at his mouth with one hand, and winced. There was new skin on his lips, or at least it felt that way, but it burst into a thousand stings at the brush of his hand.

"Sit down, then. Put your head between your knees."

Malfoy forced him to the floor, and Harry bowed his head under directions-well, guidance, really, since Malfoy's hand had clamped on the back of his neck and shoved down-and breathed as softly as he could. His new coating of skin continued to feel strange. His memory continued to soften around the edges of that extraordinary moment when he'd stood there without any covering.

And he continued to realize that he owed Malfoy his life again.

"Thank you," he said, when he could look up. His voice croaked. He cleared his throat, because he thought that weakness in front of Malfoy would be inexcusable, and said, "Yes, thank you. Does that cancel out one of the life-debts you owe me?"

Malfoy blinked and focused on him. He had been peering at the places on Harry's arms where his fingers had torn through his skin, and that left his face closer to Harry's than Harry was comfortable with. He shifted back, and Malfoy receded until he was more calming, less close.

"Two?" Malfoy asked. "Several? I was unaware that I owed you more than one, when you saved me from the Fiendfyre."

"I took out a Death Eater who was about to hurt you, too," Harry said, a little sorry that he'd mentioned it now. Malfoy's expression wasn't professional; instead, he seemed to assume that Harry had brought up the life-debts to hurt him, and he looked wary. "Sorry. I didn't mean to-it isn't important." He looked away and started to get to his feet.

Malfoy's clamped hand on his arm stopped him. "It _is _important, for a pair of people who might have to save each other's lives several times over the next few days," Malfoy insisted. "How many is it?"

Harry shuffled his feet and managed to keep looking there instead of meeting Malfoy's eyes, which he thought would be too painful right now. "Two from you to me," he said. "Or one, now that you saving my life effectively cancels it." Malfoy gave him a little shake, and Harry winced, wondering if his newly healed wounds were going to split open from that. "And one from me to you, since you didn't identify us in the Manor. Oh, and one from me to your mum, since she saved my life in the Forbidden Forest," he added hopelessly. "I don't know if debts owed by blood relatives count."

"They can," Malfoy said, his eyes shut, his face still again. Harry discovered that he liked the expression, and decided _that _was a strange thing to learn, in the last days of his life or any time, that he liked the way Malfoy looked when he was thinking. "It depends on the total overall web of magic-did anyone else owe you a debt? Or do they?"

"Snape owed one to my father, that was apparently transferred to me," Harry said. "But I think that he more than fulfilled it with the help he gave us during the war. I don't really know how those things work."

Now Malfoy's eyes were open again, and they were incredulous. "_What_?" he asked. "How in the world couldn't you know? Why wouldn't you try to find out, once you discovered that you didn't know?"

Harry shot him a look of intense irritation. "Because I've lived with that kind of thing all my life, Malfoy. Someone always trying to kill me, someone always saving me, or me saving them. It's the kind of thing that ceases to matter after a while because you get numb to it."

"Shite," Malfoy murmured, and fell silent, his lips moving in what might have been a spell to calm himself. Then he started to his feet. "I can't let you die," he announced.

"What?" Harry stared at him. "I thought you were already trying to keep me alive so I could explore Bubonic with you."

"I _mean_, that I can't let you die of the Withering Curse," Malfoy said, shaking his head so briskly that Harry was amazed dandruff didn't fly away from his hair. Then again, Malfoys probably weren't allowed to have dandruff. "Not without fulfilling those life-debts. There has to be a way..." He broke off and spent some more time with his eyes closed, but Harry didn't know what he was contemplating this time.

"There isn't a way to cure the Withering Curse, except the one I won't take," Harry said. "You know there isn't. And as for fulfilling the life-debts, well, we ought to cancel them out easily, in a place like this. You save me one more time, I save you twice just in case the debt from your Mum is important, and that's that." He really didn't know why Malfoy was spending so much mental time and energy on this. Personally, he wanted to get out of this room and into a different one.

Even if that one was worse, it at least wasn't the place where the skin had been stripped from him and then returned inside out.

* * *

The conundrum of owing life-debts to Potter and letting him die with the debts unfulfilled was not one that Draco had thought of, and he should have. He spent a few moments coldly punishing himself for being so preoccupied with artifacts during the last few years, and the possibility of taming Bubonic, that he had not thought of the obvious consequences of Potter's Withering Curse.

But punishment could do nothing to help the man, and so Draco passed beyond it into other thoughts a minute later. What could be done?

Letting Potter die with the debts still between them was not an option. If that happened, Draco, Potter, and possibly his mother would be condemned to become phantoms, a lesser kind of ghost that haunted the scene where a life-debt had been formed. They would be conscious of their torment, but nothing could alleviate it.

It was not the sort of afterlife that Draco fancied.

He was considering the matter when they reached the end of the room, a single cramped, wooden door that looked out of place in all that marble, and Draco had to turn his thoughts from the problem of a seemingly impossible cure to a spell that was well-known and researched to the problem of a seemingly impassable door. There was no lock, keyhole, latch, or handle. Potter stood back, frowning, and considered it, too.

Draco sneaked a quick look sideways at him. In addition to more resilience than he had expected, it seemed Potter possessed considerably more intelligence. He knew not to touch dangerous things after only one lesson. Draco had worked with makers and purveyors of Dark artifacts who had not been so wise.

"Will you have to use another of your artifacts to pass this door?" Potter asked Draco. There was no judgment in his tone. He simply looked and sounded serious, even somber, as if he didn't like to think of Draco's tools being sacrificed so quickly.

Since Draco didn't, either, they were in harmony for at least that brief moment. He nodded choppily to Potter. "I probably will, but I don't yet know which one will be best. Allow me to think for a moment."

To Draco's amazement, Potter fell silent and did so, although his arms heaved a few times as though he was straining to keep himself from pacing. Draco eyed him, then reminded himself not to be distracted by that problem of Potter right now, and bent down towards the door.

A few cast spells revealed that the door was made of exactly what it looked like, ordinary wood, although beneath and behind it thrummed a magical power that made Draco grimace. He couldn't tell what it was, and he was reluctant to expose more of his artifacts to it before he had to. The door had to be got open first, in any case.

Other spells revealed no traps on the door, no hinges, and nothing attached to it that would attack if they charged through. Draco backed up a step, eyeing it meditatively, and then decided that he would have to haul out another of his toys. He reached into a robe pocket near the one that had contained the altered salt and tugged out a small, shining egg.

Potter caught his breath and leaned nearer to look. Draco smirked at him. He knew it was beautiful. He had captured an Acromantula that had somehow got into one of his clients' houses and changed it so that it laid eggs like this instead. The normally dull colors of spider spawn had become a wonderful deep blue in his hands.

"What is that?" Potter whispered.

"Watch," Draco said back, smugly, and attached the egg to the door. It clung as though it had its own share of silk on the outside, and Draco rapped smartly downwards on the shell with one finger. Then he jumped back, pulling Potter with him. The creature inside would fasten to the first thing that touched it after it hatched, and Merlin forbid it be one of them.

Potter's hand was warm in his, warmer than it should be, and dusty and dry. Once again, Draco told himself that there was no way he could be feeling the effects of the Withering Curse this early.

Then he realized that he was moving his finger back and forth over Potter's palm in a regular, soothing pattern, and made himself stop with a snort of disgust.

Potter didn't appear to notice that he had begun or that he had stopped, which only confirmed Draco's feelings that it was useless to touch someone so preoccupied. He watched with enthralled eyes as the egg cracked down the middle and revealed a blue, crouching spider the size of Draco's outspread palms. Potter tensed, but didn't move, and Draco nodded approvingly. This would have been a bit awkward if Potter had been afraid of spiders.

The spider tapped against the door with its feet, "reading" the wood as Draco had taught its altered siblings to read metal, cloth, earth, and sometimes flesh. (Not that anyone knew about those experiments). Then it lowered its jaws, dug its pincers into the wood, and began to chew.

"I didn't know you could breed something that would do that," Potter whispered.

Draco thought a moment, then decided that he didn't know whether those words referred to a testimony of ignorance in general, or whether he had specifically thought _Draco _couldn't do something like this, and so it would be foolish to be insulted when he didn't know if he should be. He answered instead. "They're born ravenous. They'll eat whatever they're first fastened to-eat through it."

"Oh," Potter said, eyes wide, and measured the distance between them and the spider with a glance. Draco heroically refrained from laughing.

The spider was charging ahead, its pincers digging into the wood, its legs moving the unswallowed shavings out of the way, its silk spinnerets acting as extra legs that would judge the thickness of the wood and feed magical strength to its pincers accordingly. In seconds, there was a large, ragged hole in the door at hand-height, and in a few more, the spider had disappeared on the other side.

"Now what?" Potter whispered as if there was something hiding on the other side of the door that could hear them. Well, for all Draco knew, there could be. He was impressed, once again, at how sensible Potter was for a Gryffindor.

"Now I take a look and make sure that there's nothing that we need to fear," Draco answered, taking his silver telescope from his pocket. "The spider will turn around and come back through the door if we give it enough time, disintegrating the whole thing eventually, but we can't be sure that it'll take care of any other surprises or frighten the magical creatures that may make their home there."

"Because it only eats wood, right?"

Draco concealed his smirk at the need for reassurance, nodded, and leaned forwards, extending the telescope through the hole in the door.

He had time only for a glimpse of darkness before something grabbed the other end of the telescope and hauled him forwards and _through _the door, shrinking him to make him fit, while Potter's yells diminished to the shrilling of an insect behind him.


End file.
